The national transportation authorities said that during the holiday period a record 1.6 million people were expected to leave Beijing by train, up 4.2 percent over the same period of last year.

More than half of the passengers, who had travelled to Beijing to visit family and friends or who were in the capital to visit major tourist venues, were leaving the capital yesterday and today.

According to statistics released from Beijing's railway stations, an extra 40,000-50,000 people boarded trains yesterday.

Advisory staff with the Beijing Railway Station said nearly all of the tickets for October 7 and 8 to major cities and in particular to Chongqing, Xi'an, Shanghai and Nanjing were sold out.

Passengers who wanted to return to Guangzhou were told that they could only buy tickets after October 10.

To ease the situation, Beijing's 137 ticket offices operated at full capacity and laid on an additional 35 trains to meet passenger demand.

The national tourism authority estimated that an average of 500,000 domestic and overseas tourists visited scenic spots in Beijing every day during the holiday period, up 2.4 percent compared to last year.

The number of visitors to the Forbidden City was up 9.7 percent compared to last year. Hotels also got their share of the profits with an 80 percent rise in customers. Ticket sales at major tourist spots nationwide also increased by an average of 15 percent.

Even the number of flight tickets sold on October 1 reached 90 percent.

The race for tickets is apparently not over yet. More than 90 percent of return tickets from scenic spots like Zhangjiajie in Central China's Hunan Province and Dunhuang in Northwest China's Gansu Province is booked up for the coming week.

In South China's Guangdong Province, Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou handled 463 flights on Monday alone, beating the record set during this year's Spring Festival holiday.

Hong Kong is also a popular travel spot. Immigration authorities there said more than 200,000 tourists entered Hong Kong from Shenzhen on October 1, among them 300 were tourist groups.

To cope with the huge tide of passengers, all Chinese airlines arranged additional flights, including nearly 200 chartered flights.

In the remote Tibet Autonomous Region, more people also travelled by air.

Danba Qoita, a Buddhist lama from Qamdo in eastern Tibet, said he was both nervous and excited at getting on an aeroplane for the first time, as he boarded a flight to Beijing.

"I have dreamed of seeing the Yonghe Temple in Beijing for a long time, and now my dream has come true," he said.

Tickets for hot tourist sites have all been booked up. Moreover, some 36.80 million people are travelling via highway networks each day.

Railway department in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, has put an additional 150 trains into service to help ease the pressure.

In Beijing, the subway department put into operation an additional 60 trains, as 2 million people took the subway on National Day.

For those who do not intend to go far, there were other choices.

Ninety-five percent of Beijing's rental cars were snapped up by travellers eager to see the sights during the holidays, compared with the normal car rental rate of 70 percent.

The Chinese capital has about 200 car rental businesses, with about 20,000 cars - about 40 percent of the country's total cars for rent.

(Xinhua News Agency 10/08/2001)